“I don’t know what they’re called. Or where they’re from...other than...”
I raise my eyebrows. “Other than...”
She looks up.
Aliens.
Double dammit.
If I’ve got the story right, Nemesis Prime, captured by an alien race, was turned into an injustice-seeking vengeance-delivering machine, and sent to Earth to...what? Judge us? Keep us in line? Destroy us? Or maybe she was just entertaining these aliens, the destruction of ancient cities broadcast throughout the galaxy. But it’s not their motivation that really bothers me. It’s their existence. An alien race capable of containing something like Nemesis Prime would be a problem far greater than any one Kaiju. Or even a dozen. The FC-P would need some kind of miraculous extraordinary help to keep them from making short work of the human race.
“If it makes you feel better,” she says, “it was like ten thousand years ago.”
It doesn’t. “Ten thousand years? But that predates the Greeks by...a lot.”
“She was around for a long time, sometimes hibernating long enough for people to think she had died, but when she wasn’t sleeping...”
“I get it,” I say, putting a hand on her shoulder. “You’re bearing a weight I don’t think anyone else but you could handle. If you’ve still got a little bit of the Kaiju muscle in you, that’s probably a good thing.”
Her eyes go wide. “You sure about that?”
“As sure as I am that you’ve been hiding it from me.”
Caught, she turns away again, this time entering the morgue. I recover the flashlight and follow. We stop in front of a pile of bones. Above her, scrawled in now dark blood by Maigo’s then clawed hands, is the single word:
Greek for Nemesis.
“When were you going to tell me?” I ask, before Maigo can distract me with ancient tales of woe.
“I didn’t...” Her head sags.
“You thought you would change again?”
“I don’t want to be her again. I don’t want to kill any more people. I don’t want to eat anyone!”
I rub my hand over Maigo’s back the way my mother used to do mine. “You’re not changing.”
“I’m getting taller! And heavier!”
“You’re sixteen...we think. You’re still growing. Give it another year and you’ll be done.” This seems to resonate. As she calms, I mentally pat myself on the back. This parenting stuff isn’t too bad. Of course, we haven’t yet addressed the non-standard stuff. “So...what can you do? Besides eat people.”
Maigo flinches away, but she’s smiling. She gets my sense of humor, which can sometimes be morbid and is almost always inappropriate. She swats my shoulder, and for the first time, I can see just how much she’s holding back. “Dad!”
Whoa...
Dad.
This is new.
While Lilly jumped right into dubbing everyone uncle, aunt and in Maigo’s case, sister, Maigo has never once called me anything other than ‘Jon.’ She’s almost formal with people, her emotional boundaries strict and rigid.
I play it cool. “So let me guess. You can see in the dark. Any other sensory stuff?”
“Mostly just the eyes. I can see really far, too. And I can feel this... I don’t know what it is. But I remember what it felt like to be me. To be just human. And the me now, in my head, is different. I feel something like static, but faint. Sometimes I feel it pulse, but most of the time it’s just a steady pull. I’ve gotten good at ignoring it.”
“Huh.” I have no idea what this could be, and I’m certainly not the person to figure it out. That’s more up Joliet’s alley. “And you’re strong, right? Dug a hole all the way down here.”
“Yeah,” she says, smiling this time. “I’m strong.”
“How strong?”
“Stronger than you.” She laughs, and I feel a weight fall away. She’s returning to herself. Quiet. Reserved. And sometimes funny, but usually only when it’s just the two of us.
“Stronger than Lilly?”
Her grin widens.
“Really?” I’m genuinely surprised.
“Don’t tell her,” she says. “I don’t think she’d like that.”
“Lilly doesn’t like a lot of things, but she gets used to it. Speaking of which, we beat her today.”
“Then definitely don’t tell her about this.”
“We’ll keep this between you and me until you’re ready,” I say, “But if you’re worried about changing, Joliet can probably run some tests...or wait...did Ash have the feminine talk with you yet?” I make air quotes with my fingers when I say ‘feminine.’
“And now things just got weird.” She steps around me and heads for the door.
“Really? We can talk about eating people, ancient goddesses and what it feels like to be a Kaiju, but we can’t have the feminine talk?”